Server Space and Bandwidth

How much server space and bandwidth do you need?

Basic plan prices are usually set in relation to server space and bandwidth, but unless you have already calculated your space needs, your website very likely requires less space than you would expect. You may want to select a web hosting plan that allows for growth, but your hosting service will be happy to upgrade to a higher-capacity plan whenever you need it, and reviews say there is no need to pay for more server space or bandwidth than you need -- most web hosts offer plenty of capacity for even the lowest-priced plans.

You can determine your initial server-space needs in several ways; if you know what files and folders you want to post online, right click on the folder(s) and select "properties" (Windows only) to see the file size. Popular website creation programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage will show you the size of individual pages and the entire site. In Adobe or Macromedia Dreamweaver, the page file size is shown in the data in the lower right-hand corner of the page window. In Microsoft FrontPage, click on "Reports," and the top entry will show you the cumulative size of all the files in your website.

If you haven't created your site yet, you can check the size of any web page using Internet Explorer to gain ideas of typical page sizes. Choose "properties" from the "file" menu. The page size is expressed in bytes (1024 bytes = 1 kb, 1024 kb = 1 MB). For example, the USA Today home page, which contains lots of text and images, is 118 KB; the CNN home page is 103 KB. This kind of exercise will give you an idea of the association between file sizes and web-pages. If 30 pages on a website average 50 KB, the website is 1,500 KB (just over 1 MB). This means that even some large multi-page websites actually need very little server space.

As described above, bandwidth in this context is the number of times per month each page is viewed. If each page on a hypothetical 30-page website (with each page at 50 KB) is viewed an average of 100 times in a month, the total monthly bandwidth is 150,000 KB or 146 MB -- that's 30 pages viewed 100 times (3,000 page views) times 50 KB. So your total bandwidth would be just 146 MB -- far within the 5 GB or 6 GB allowance offered by most basic web hosting plans.

Most web hosting services provide statistics that show how often each is page is visited. Until you have actual data, you may have to guess how many "hits" your website will draw.